Eclipse the Sun!

And Uncross the Stars

In case, you are the one roommate of a toad, living under a large toadstool in the middle nowhere, who has not yet heard, there is going to be an Eclipse today.

It will pass over North America, turning parts of Canada and America black for four minutes in the middle of the afternoon.

Astronomers can predict when all the eclipses will be, both back in time and forward into the future. So we have known this eclipse was coming for, well, forever.

That does make me wonder why some states are declaring a State of Emergency and people are rushing out to buy milk.

In what possible way does four minutes of darkness endanger the purchasing of milk?

There are places in Alaska where the sun goes down in mid-December and comes up in January. That’s the kind of darkness for which you want to stock up on milk.

Four minutes and a few seconds of darkness?

Not so much.

I remember when the planets lined up in 1984. There was some definite nervousness. Some claimed the world might end, the tidal forces might pull us apart.

Of course, it didn’t help that it happened to be the year 1984*.

*—people still read things called books back then. A popular one was called 1984. This was, of course, before the Powers That Be took this book and decided that it was not a terrifying dystopia but an instruction manual. But, I digress…

I did not normally watch David Letterman’s late-night show, but I happened to be watching it that night. At one point, Mr. Letterman, sitting before his image of the New York skyline, announced matter-of-factly, “That silence you just heard might have been the end of the world. We're sending someone down to find out.”

I thought this was so funny that today, in 2024, I still remember it.

But in the defense of those who worried then, the planets had not lined up in a while.

As to this eclipse, it’s not as if we didn’t know it was coming. In fact, there are very few things as predictable as an eclipse.

That’s the whole point of the story A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court…that with a Farmer’s Almanac, I think it is, he knows exactly when the eclipse would have taken place…and when they will take place.

They can be predicted like clockwork.

In the wonderful documentary, The Star of Bethlehem documentary, which can be found here, Frederick Larson uses astrological software to look back in time at the sky over the Year One and other Biblical events. He found an eclipse just about where Good Friday was predicted to be. (He says when Peter talks about the events from Joel, where the sky turns black, the populous would have just seen it with their own eyes.)

Even the Ancient Greeks could predict eclipses. The philosopher Thales predicted the eclipse on May 29th, 525 BC.

And if you look around, you can find eclipses predicted well into the future, as well. The next one in America, for instance, is in 2044. Here’s a place that lists eclipses through 2100.

The only thing that cannot be predicted about eclipses is whether weather conditions will eclipse them. (Try saying that fast three times!) [Not an issue in Rachel Griffin’s world, of course, because the enchanters can clear clouds from the sky. Alas, this is not available to us.]

Connecticut Yankee is not the only work of fiction where eclipses are important. Eclipses were really important in Uncross the Stars, a book I have rewritten at least fourteen times. In that background, if you created a work of art during an eclipse, there was a chance that a god might walk up and speak to you.

If you lived, you became a Creator—someone who could make worlds.

Sadly, for many reasons, I probably will never get back to working on that series. Even though I love that background, and Victoria Woods may be my favorite of all characters, I just have too many other projects.

But here, since it will probably never be published otherwise, is the eclipse scene from the current version of Uncross the Stars. (A dragon has invaded Washington, DC, and the sun is in danger of going dark. A young woman has just discovered this, and she is trying to travel east from California to see if she can figure out how to stop it.)

Chapter Five:   Fear Not, Rejoice!

 Victoria Woods stood before the airline counter awaiting her turn at the automatic check-in machine and tapping her foot impatiently. It had taken her two days to hike back to civilization, figure out how to turn some of her gold into cash, and book a flight. Now, all she had to do was check in, and she would be on her way back east.

Only, no one was flying into DC or into Baltimore, or Dulles, or even Newark. The nearest destination to which she could get a last minute ticket was Chicago. She hoped that by the time she arrived, she would be able to arrange a connecting flight to take her closer.

As she waited, she played peek-a-boo with a baby in a stroller beside her. Its mother argued with a ticket agent in a lovely fluid accent about some problem with her ticket to Nigeria. She was a tall woman dressed in a brightly-patterned sheath and a turban. The little one had huge eyes and the roundest face. When Victoria popped out from behind her fingers, it laughed, showing three tiny teeth.

The joy in the child’s eyes struck Victoria through the heart.

Above her, through the wide windows, the setting sun hung swollen and orangey in the sky. Was it already dimmer than it should be at this time of day? In her mind’s eye, the sun had gone out, and the little child was crying incessantly as it froze to death, its mother hugging it, trying vainly to shield her baby from the relentless cold with her own shivering body.

Victoria blinked tears from her eyes. She looked around the airport, taking in the old man who argued with his little wife in an overly-loud voice, not wanting to let go of his luggage to have it weighed; the well-dressed business woman who wheeled her bag behind her, her heels clicking smartly against the floor; the family of six over by the windows, where the four children climbed on the radiators and pressed their noses against the glass, watching the planes rise, the eldest daughter staring at her phone. Beyond them, dozens of people rushed to their destinations.

They were all fated to die.

Victoria’s hands slowly curled into fists and tightened until her knuckles went white. No. Nothing so horrible could be meant to be. The future was a shining place, where all these people lived and laughed and prospered.

Or it would be when she was done with it.

            *                                                          *                                                          *

 O’Hare offered no connecting flights to the east. No one wanted to fly toward the dragon that could knock airplane engines out with its eyebeams and cause pilots to jump from their planes without parachutes. Victoria rented a car, set her GPS in the coin holder, and drove.

Somewhere around mid-morning, she caught herself nodding off. She had been up all night and the day before. In fact, she could not recall when she had last slept properly. She had dozed off a few times on the plane, but the snoring of the person in the seat next to her kept waking her. She longed to reach her destination and set about saving Thomas and Bernard, but it would not help her friends if she fell asleep and drove off the road. Poking at her GPS, she looked up nearby state parks with camping facilities and chose Lake Hope State Park.

Arriving at the park half and hour later, she set up her tent and cooked a packet of dried vegetarian stew. It tasted sweet and salty, but she was too exhausted to eat much. Pulling off her sweater and jeans, she changed into her favorite Star Knoll tee shirt and a pair of hiking shorts and climbed into her sleeping bag.

She should have conked out immediately. She was dead tired. But for some reason, she could not fall asleep. Finally, she rose and took out her laptop. Writing often made her wish she could stop and take a nap. Maybe if she wrote something now, she would fall asleep.

Beneath the cool verdant shade of a large oak, Victoria searched for the perfect spot to sit and write. Dappled light played across her computer. To the left lay a soft pile of dry leaves. It made an inviting seat. As she sat down, she took a moment to remind herself of what was happening in her latest scene.

Victoria’s book began with her heroine leaving her home in High Heaven and descending through the vastness of Old Night to the Milky Way, far below, vowing to stop its master, Death. The story was set amidst the backdrop of the war between the Norse gods—the Vanir and the Aesir. In Victoria’s version, the Vanir were enemies of Death, and the Aesir were Death’s grandchildren.

The Vanir were elvish knights from the Summer Country, noble and brave. They were known for their shining mirrored cloaks, which deflected all possible harm, and for their helms, atop which they openly displayed their heraldic symbols. They carried celestial weapons, the wounds of which could not be healed.

The Aesir, on the other hand, were subtle and deceitful folk, who hid their true identities as they slipped secretly among mortal men. Many of them were wounded: missing arms, legs, or their sanity. To emphasize the idea that the Aesir were incognito, Victoria had dispensed with their original Norse appellations and named them after characters from Shakespeare’s plays, names like Romeo, Mercutio, Oberon, Laertes, Tybalt, and Robin. The Aesir themselves, she had called the Runelords.

Overhead, the light waned, the shadows in the forest growing darker. That was strange. It was still midday. Victoria looked up. In a brilliant blue sky, a dark object encroached upon the sun.

Jumping to her feet, she scanned the sky nervously. Was this the Sons of Darkness attacking? Then, relief made her limbs weak. It was just the disk of the moon. This was the eclipse that Bernard had been looking forward to, back before the dragon had attacked Wheeling. She had entirely forgotten about it.

How long ago that seemed—the time when all had been normal and paying her bills had been her worst problem.

Staring at an eclipse was said to be bad for the eyes. Victoria pulled her gaze away and returned to her laptop. Its screen glowed brightly in the false twilight. The last time she had sat down to write, she had finally reached a scene she had played out in her imagination a thousand times: the scene where her heroine first met the Lord of Death.

He sat upon his dark throne, swathed in stars and robed in the night sky, his black eyes reflecting the universe. Within them could be glimpsed his iron will and the vastness of his purpose. This he showed to all, but she alone discerned something more, far beneath, in the utter depths of his dark heart: sorrow and deepest despair, for all around him lay death, and he knew no end of it.

Victoria smiled as she read. She really liked that description. It had taken her year to get it right, writing and rewriting it, trying to capture all that she could see in her mind. It was so easy to see amazing things in her imagination and so hard to find the right words.

All her life, her mind had been filled with stories. It was almost as if she lived two lives. one that everyone else could see, and a second in the secret Realm of the Imagination, a place of fanciful landscapes peopled with exciting characters who seemed so much larger than the so-called life through which her body plodded.

And so she had dreamt of marvels, of wonders, of vistas unknown, and of pristine landscapes never visited by the footstep of man. She had dreamt of starry scapes and crystal waterfalls from which a flock-herd of winged centaur drank at dawn, of emerald beaches, of silver-leaved trees, and of milky rivers that ran upward until they poured into the sky.

All these things—charming characters and enchanted landscapes—lived in her head, crowding and pushing each other, as if longing to be let out. Up until now, their only hope had been fiction—that she might prove an able enough writer to do them justice on paper. But they deserved so much more. They deserved to come alive.

If she became a Creator, they could live.

Returning to her keyboard, Victoria began writing, describing the reaction of her heroine, Auroru, whose secret name was Prolumorghue. The desire to settle for the first images that came to mind and to forge ahead to the next scene tempted her as it always did, but Victoria rejected it. She did not want to merely finish her story; she wanted it to be true—to reflect, to her best ability, the greater ideal that her heart told her was out there. It was as if the story she wished to tell existed elsewhere, and if she was brave enough and patient enough, she could find it.

Creator Vision. The phrase echoed delightfully through her thoughts. She looked back at the words she had typed on the screen. Was this scene real? Was that why it felt as if she were discovering something true? The thought that all this might have once happened filled her with a frightening wonder.

Auroru had been Victoria’s constant imaginary companion ever since, as a child of six, her family passed through Grand Central Station in New York City. She had glanced up and  fallen in love with the Winged Pegasus painted upon the station’s huge domed ceiling. Auroru was the Opener of the Way. She could go anywhere. No lock or barrier could bar her.

Originally, Victoria had pictured her character as a winged unicorn. Later, she changed her into a woman, who merely rode upon a winged unicorn, because the idea of writing a love story between a unicorn and the Lord of Death had seemed childish.

“Prolumorghue,” she whispered.

A lightning bolt cut across the darkening sky and struck the ground a few feet from where she sat, accompanied by a very loud crackling noise but no boom. The flash illuminated the towering oak. Victoria blinked and waited for her vision to clear.

A creature stood where the lightning had struck the earth, all shimmering and bright, on four dainty silver hooves. She had a mane like a horse, a body like a deer, and a tufted tail like a lioness. Slender wings, with feathers of soft, crackling electricity, swept back from her graceful withers, and an ivory horn rose in a spiral from her brow.

The shining creature walked forward. Where she stepped, flowers sprang up in her footprints.

It was Her.

Auroru looked exactly as Victoria had pictured her as a child, only more beautiful, more delicate and ethereal. With a squeak of delight, Victoria realized that her heroine really was a winged unicorn.

Her laptop flashed and went dark. The only light now came from the soft glow of the Unicorn’s too-white body.

Victoria leapt up and ran to the creature, hugging her. She rubbed her face against the silver-tipped fur, so soft beneath her cheek. Breathing in, she inhaled the scent of ozone mixed with the most beautiful fragrances imaginable—like roses, lilacs, and honeysuckles all rolled up into one, and yet more glorious still, as if the flowers of the mortal world were but poor imitations of a heavenly original. 

The Unicorn lifted her head and nuzzled her velvety nose against Victoria’s ear and neck. A tingle went through her body, as if a flood-tide of love were washing away every hurt and ill—as if her soul had been a countryside full of pits and bumps, where each pothole or hillock was an ugly reminder of harms past, and all this was suddenly made smooth by a storm wind so sweet and pure that it was as if joy itself had breathed upon the countryside, leaving it as fresh and unblemished as an untouched sandy white beach.

Victoria’s eyes spilled over with tears, and she began to cry.

“Finally,” she whispered into the silky mane, “Oh, finally. At last!”

If she pulled out her phone and took a picture, would that be considered rude?

“Fear not. Rejoice!”

The words were not spoken as much as felt. Victoria wiped her cheeks and drew back, releasing her shining companion.

The Unicorn gazed into her eyes and asked, without speaking: “Navona?”

Victoria understood. It was the language she had made up as a child. It was the thing Auroru always asked whomever she met: people, animals, trees, dark masters of the universe. It meant, roughly translated: Are you happy?

“I am happy,” she whispered back, “And yet, at the same time, my heart is filled with sorrow. I weep for those who are doomed to die. Can’t we free them? Unmake their cruel fates?” Suddenly, she gave a shaky laugh. “Isn’t that why you came down from High Heaven? To save everyone? Even him?”

“Sur.” [Yes]

“And that’s what we want, isn’t it?” Victoria cried with joy. “To save everyone!” She thought of Death in her novel, trapped in a loneliness of his own devising—not so different in a way from a certain grim Archmage she had recently encountered—and murmured under her breath, “Even Kestrel.”

The Unicorn lowered her head and struck her horn into the earth. She stepped back and lifted her head again. The horn stayed behind, however, standing upright in the dirt. A flower-like spiral of ivory remained upon the Unicorn’s shimmering forehead. The nub of ivory expanded rapidly until a new horn grew in its place.

“Is this one for me?” Victoria asked in a hushed whisper.

She drew the long spiral ivory horn from the dirt and hugged it to her chest. Then, she gazed into the Unicorn’s huge silver-flecked lavender eyes.

The universe turned upside down. Material objects became as flimsy as mist, while things of the spirit became as substantial as adamant.  The difference between herself and the Unicorn blurred, and they were for a time one individual. Victoria saw the real universe, of which the universe she normally lived in was just an echo, a reflection.

Two things became unmistakably clear. The first was: Death was an illusion.

It was a trick the Unicorn’s husband played upon the inhabitants of the his universe to make his country of gossamer and shadow seem real.

The second was: because this ephemeral world was the Kingdom of Death—a labyrinth built upon illusion and fear—no matter how many times Victoria repeated the first truth, no one who dwelt herein would believe her.